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The Padres’ rookie general manager admits to flinging phones in moments of exasperation, but he won’t waste his wrath on a 7-1 blowout. Hoyer watched his first-place ballclub slip into second place Wednesday evening with the emotional detachment of a surgeon studying X-rays of Calvin Coolidge.

Lopsided games, Hoyer says, are a better barometer of a baseball club’s potential than are one-run games. But they don’t linger as long or imperil as many inanimate objects.

“Damn it,” Hoyer mutters when Chase Headley grounds into a force play in the seventh inning.

“Too bad,” he sighs when Toronto’s Fred Lewis chops a two-run single into left field in the eighth.

Watching the Padres play in Hoyer’s presence is like watching two teams you don’t follow with an engaging, perceptive and nearly neutral observer. The conversation is stimulating but subdued, prone to descriptive digressions, flurries of free association but notably free of premarital apprehension. (Hoyer is to be married June 26 in St. Louis.)

When a foul ball strikes just below his booth, Hoyer remarks on the need to screen more spectators from line drives. He recalls reading an essay as an admissions officer at Wesleyan in which an applicant recounted a softball game in which one of the players was killed by a bolt of lightning.

He watches the game focused tightly on pitch location and variations in velocity. He fidgets at length with the green plastic cap of a bottled water, then springs into more purposeful action when the Blue Jays mount a fifth-inning threat. Poking expertly at an iPad, Hoyer retrieves data concerning Padres’ pitcher Kevin Correia’s statistical point of diminishing returns.

Toronto’s three-run rally is in keeping with Correia’s pitch-count pattern, but Hoyer watches it unfold without palpable anxiety or anger. He takes the long view that his starting pitchers need to be stretched out so as to minimize strain on his bullpen. He watches this game as one of 162 rather than as a sign of the apocalypse.

He is the very model of a modern baseball executive: analytical, aware, curious, incisive, tech-savvy and temperate.

Sue Smith, wife of Chargers’ General Manager A.J. Smith, made Hoyer’s acquaintance earlier this season and asked him, “How are you so calm?”

“We do this every night,” Hoyer explained Wednesday. “I try to keep that in perspective.”

He is conscious, too, that his example has a bearing on the attitude and resilience of his subordinates, and therefore strives to show that the man in charge maintains control of himself.

When a ball-strike call confounds him, Hoyer raises the question without raising his voice. When Nick Hundley’s eighth-inning drive is snared on the warning track in left-center field, Hoyer allows, “That’s probably a home run in 29 parks,” but qualifies this observation with a quote from his job interview, in which he said that he would rather move Petco Park’s fences back than closer to home plate.

This is in keeping with one of the critical planks of Hoyer’s platform: to make San Diego the favorite destination for free-agent pitchers. This is a niche, Hoyer says, that is more cost-effective than competing for sluggers, though it is worlds away from the big-budget warfare being waged in the American League East.